Are regular expressions worth the hassle?

Question

It strikes me that regular expressions are not understood well by the majority of developers. It also strikes me that for a lot of problems where regular expressions are use

Answer 1

Due to the type of apps I build, the only RegEx's I regularly use are for email validation, html stripping, and character stripping to remove the garbage around phone numbers.

It's rare that I need to do very much string manipulation other than concatenation.

Incidentally, the apps are typically CRM's.

So the hassle for me is limited to googling for a regex in the event I find myself in need. ;)